Berta Cortada Solé / Staff Reporter
Everything I Never Told You is the story about a Chinese-American family who must deal with the sudden death of their middle daughter Lydia, found drowned in a nearby lake. The book travels back and forth between different time periods such as the parents’ childhoods, their early adult lives or their first years as a family, to the present, where everyone is deeply affected by Lydia’s death.
This novel was published in 2014 as the debut work of the American writer Celeste Ng. The book was published by Penguin Press on June 26, it has 298 pages, and it’s considered a psychological fiction, mystery, thriller, and suspense novel. The most noticeable award that this work has received is the Amazon Book of the Year Award received in 2014, where it beat books from famous authors like Stephen King and Hilary Mantel.
Everything I Never Told You deals with topics such as immigration (both legal and illegal) and racism towards Asian people. The book not only shows actions of racism from others, but also the internalized racism that Chinese and Chinese-American people go through. One of the most important things that the book talks about is the way parents behave, educate or have been educated and how that affects their kids. We can see an example of that with Marylin (Lydia’s mother) and how the rejection that she suffered from her mother, because she was marrying a Chinese man, impacted the way she treats her daughters. On the other hand, the fact that Hannah (the youngest sibling) has been ignored by her family during her life has made her turn out to be a very quiet and silent teenager.
Personally, this is my first time reading this author, and even though sometimes it was very tough to get through the book, I really liked it. The way multiple sensitive and serious topics get touched in these pages is very interesting, because it rarely mentions the words racism or discrimination, instead it allows the reader to jump onto conclusions, which may change depending on one’s own past experiences or knowledge on the topics. I also liked how the plot develops and keeps getting things added until the very end of the story. I would recommend this novel to anyone who is looking for a quick book to read, because it really traps you in it and you can easily finish it in a week or less.
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